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Michael Horace Barnes "Stages of Thought: The Co-Evolution of Religious Thought and Science"

This book provides a unique exploration of the relationship between religious and scientific thought. Arguing that these two modes of thought are complementary, Barnes delineates the successive stages of the co-evolution of religious and scientific thought in the West, from the preliterate culture of antiquity up to the present day.

PREFACE

M[ore than 20 years ago, when I first began to explore the

ideas described here about long-term cultural cognitive development,

half of the sources listed in the bibliography had not yet been

written. So the research for this book was partly a process of reviewing

older materials, but it was equally an ongoing process of keeping up with

new materials. For a while, as postmodern relativism gained popularity,

the scholarly currents were flowing against any attempts to identify

large-scale cross-cultural similarities. "Thick descriptions" of individual

cultures, one at a time, was the ideal. Nonetheless, even in these studies

of individual cultures, it seemed to me that I could find similarities in the

cognitive styles among otherwise quite different cultures. Fortunately for

my peace of mind, books identifying cross-cultural patterns have been

on the increase. I have drawn upon many of them in both the Introduction

and Chapter I.

Nonetheless, these years of research have given me a consciousness

of my limitations for the task of this book, which is to describe human

cognitive behavior across cultures and through human history. That is

a lot for one person to cover. It is possible only by relying on numerous

secondary sources, which in turn creates the risk of unwittingly accepting

biased or distorted interpretations. I have tried to compensate for that

risk by sampling many relevant primary sources, reading Mohist texts,

the principal Upanishads, Bernard Silvester's cosmology, Newton's

Scholia, and so on. But this is only sampling, and most in translation,

another potential source of error. So I suspect that many a scholar will

find it easy to point out errors and omissions in that scholar's area of

expertise.

What I can best hope for from the scholarly experts in fields not my

own is a willingness to try out the thesis offered here about cultural

cognitive developments; to treat it as an interesting hypothesis worth

exploring, to consider the evidence that makes the hypothesis at least

plausible. Whatever survives such consideration might contribute significantly

to our awareness of what is common to the human family, what

we share in spite of our many differences, what kinds of development

might be available to human societies everywhere, if those forms of development

seem more advantageous than not.

CONTENTS

Introduction 3

1 Culture and Cognition 15

2 Addressing the Critics 34

3 Cognitive Styles in Primitive Cultures 53

4 Archaic Thought, Preliterate and Literate 78

5 The Axial Age and the Classical Style of Thought 93

6 Philosophy, Religion, and Science in Western Antiquity 112

7 The Decline and Recovery of Classical Rationality in the West 132

8 Early Modern Models of Reality in Science and Religion 152

9 The Method of Modern Empirical Science 175

10 Religious Responses to Modern Science 200

Notes 233

Bibliography 298

Index 323

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